Retribution Paladin Corruption Guide - Shadowlands 9.0.1 Shadowlands 9.0.2

By Rebdull Updated: 2020/06/28

With the defeat of N'zoth, all corruption is gone from items with Patch 9.0.

View ChangelogNavigation BarHammer of WrathtwitterBuying Corruptions with Echoes of Ny'alotha for Retribution Paladinpurchased from MOTHEREchoes of Ny'alothaIf you buy secondary stat corruptions you should buy Rank 3Echoes of Ny'alotha

Masterful - More valuable than it first appears since it increases the bonus mastery gained from Avenger's Might traits. Its low corruption amount means that it’s easy to fit into your corruption budget and can be stacked on most of your gear. If you’re planning to do a variety of content and want one gearset for it all, this is the one to buy.

Severe/Strikethrough - Using multiple pieces with Severe along with Expurgation traits has a slightly higher potential single target output than Masterful, but doesn’t scale as well on fights with more targets. Strikethrough can be good once you have a lot of pieces with Severe but you generally shouldn’t buy this until it’s the last slot or two you add corruption to.

Ineffable Truth - Reduces downtime in the rotation, helps you use Avenging Wrath again quicker and is just a good overall damage increase. Rank 1 is slightly less efficient per corruption than Rank 2, but as corruption resistance increases this will become less important.

Infinite Stars/Twisted Appendage/Gushing Wound - These damage procs all scale with item level, so if you do buy them make sure to put them on your highest item level gear. Infinite Stars is better than Twisted Appendage or Gushing Wound on exactly one mob, but loses value with more targets as it’s less likely to stack up. These effects generally aren’t as strong as the secondary stat increases or Ineffable Truth, but can be competitive with the right gearset.

Twilight Devastation - Powerful on AoE, but high variance. Good for M+ if for some reason you don’t use Masterful, but not one to prioritize highly unless you really need to fill out a lot of corruption at once.

Best Retribution Paladin Corruption BonusesRaidbotsHow To GuideLash of the VoidUnguent CaresshereRetpaladin.xyzhereThings to keep in mind...

Always sim your options. Because everything works in tiers, you may get a piece of gear with Tier 1 Infinite Stars on it and see it sim lower than another piece of gear with a Tier 3 effect that you may consider "worse".

If your sims don't look like the recommendations or charts here, don't worry! Azerite traits, item level of corrupted gear, amounts of secondary stats and more can all affect how corruption performs for you personally.

Best Retribution Paladin Ny'alotha Weapons

Sk'shuul Vaz Boss: Maut - Obsidian Destruction was buffed and can be very good for some people if your options are limited. Sim this and other corrupted items you have access to to determine if you should cleanse it or not.

Devastation's Hour Boss: N'zoth the Corruptor- trigger a beam of Twilight Devastation dealing damage based on your health to enemies in front of you. This corruption bonus is extremely good for multi-target, and pretty good for single-target.

Dealing with Negative Effects of Corruption

Grasping Tendrils - Unlocked with 1 Corruption

Eye of Corruption - Unlocked with 20 Corruption

Grand Delusions - Unlocked with 40 Corruption

Cascading Disaster - Unlocked with 60 Corruption

Inevitable Doom - Unlocked with 80 Corruption

Learn more about Corruption in our in-depth guide!

Ashjra'kamas, Shroud of Resolve

Grasping Tendrils can be removed from you and your allies with Blessing of Freedom.

Eye of Corruption might take some practice to adjust to. In general, just move out of the circle while making sure you aren't moving into boss mechanics or leaving melee range. Depending on your corruption level, you could use this void zone to use Shield of Vengeance offensively.

Grand Delusions summons an add that can be stunned with Hammer of Justice. Targeting macros do not work on them. Tab target does work.

Cascading Disaster while you should generally not be getting corruption this high, you can (in theory) stun the Thing from Beyond, but at this corruption level it runs fast. Remember all previous effects scale with corruption level so things will spiral quickly if this add hits you.

Inevitable Doom you should absolutely never use this level of corruption without having a serious discussion with your group. While you may conclude the benefits may outweigh the risks in certain situations, this level of corruption absolutely puts more burden on your group. It could be a very good way to alienate your party or raid group.

How Much Corruption Should a Retribution Paladin Take?Grasping TendrilsEye of CorruptionCascading DisasterFeedbackDiscord server

Comments

Comment by Cjax4

"As a Fury Warrior, you can obtain weapons with the following effects:"

Suggested edit, " as a Retribution Paladin..."

This is Retribution Guide, not Fury Warrior :)

Comment by sprendinea

actually lol'd at those corruption suggestions. garbage recommendations.

Comment by Gorelock

This "guide" is actually just wrong.

Below you can see sim examples for very high damage, consistent single target and AOE using mastery/ineffible based builds:

ST:
https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/ryTjKDHveBGCWZe292hv3B

AOE:
https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/eWRkv5ZsjzZAVowFybroD8

replacing 1 empyrean power for 1 additional avenger's might increases the single target sim by about another 3k.

Consistent builds like this one can very easily top both Single target doing almost 100k as well as AOE doing over 130k

The damage will go up as you add more masterful rank 3 and an additional honed mind.

I go much more in depth about all this on my Guide on YT.

Comment by Defaultret

Please Note that this does not take into fact of stacking corruptions. As a Ret player from what i've simmed and played with my self mastery amp seems best for both single target and aoe. Other good corruption are ineffable truth.

Comment by Alejomg95

This is such a low effort guide that will probably mislead someone that doesn't know how to sim or doesn't sim properly. Infinite stars is not something you should get as a ret pally because of our low haste and on top of that, IS is very limited for most fights. Twilight devastation is good for some content, but again, due to our low haste it's probably not as good as stacking masterful for big divine storms. Void ritual can be ok, but for most people I think masterful sims the best and it's not even mentioned here.

Wowhead should honestly delete this "guide", because it is just wrong and misleading.

Comment by Vestaxe

Hey there!

I'd like to respectfully disagree with some of the information in this guide, and provide some alternatives to the corruptions suggested.

Before I get in to the meat of this, I'd just like to mention a disclaimer: These corruption combinations have always been good for Retribution Paladins and the corruption vendor hasn't changed anything, it's just allowed people to easily target the build/corruption style that they want to with relative ease instead of needing to get lucky. As always, sim yourself and what works best for your character.

I'd first like to talk about Infinite Stars/Twilight Devastation; corruptions such as these are very RNG, and on sims they will give you very high results because the sims assume an average proc per minute - unfortunately Infinite Stars and other similar corruptions (Twisted Appendage for example) have quite a high variance and will more often than not disappoint when running them in a fight, and at the very least will leave you frustrated when you don't get a pull with good RNG. You will see these corruptions on Warcraftlogs as the top logging corruptions, because if you get lucky with procs during a fight, you will have a very high output, and of course the top logs are going to be people who had good procs during their fight when running these corruptions, please do not get fooled in to thinking these are the only corruptions that you can and should run, as posited in this guide, because this is simply just not the case.

TL;DR - these corruptions have the potential to give you really high output, but they are in no way consistent.

There are multiple corruptions that are good for Retribution Paladins and I will touch on a couple of builds that people are targetting at the moment and why, before I get in to this though, I will mention that a lot of corruptions are good for Ret, and you will be surprised when running sims at the combinations that it throws at you from what you have in your bags.

Before I talk about alternative builds to those suggested in this guide, I'd also like to touch on Ineffable Truth. Ineffable Truth synergises really well with Retribution Paladins for a couple of reasons; the bottleneck on spending Holy Power is generating Holy Power, and during an Ineffable Truth proc we see the remaining cooldown on our abilities reduced quite a lot (depending on the rank you run, as a note it's better to run multiple Rank 1's as you get more value per corruption). Additionally, Retribution Paladins currently (mostly) run Crusade as a talent, and at least 1x Light's Decree trait, this results in a 30 second duration on Crusade (Wings). This is usually run in combination with Visions of Perfection Major which, at 84 neck level, gives a chance for Wings to proc for 10 seconds, combined with the minor that reduces the cooldown of Wings to 1.5m (also at 84 neck level), this means that once Wings has ended, there is only 1 minute until it can be used again, throw in a couple of Visions procs and some CD reduction from Ineffable Truth, and you will see some major up-time on Wings across a Raid Encounter/Dungeon.

I'd now like to discuss two very distinct "builds" outside of just stacking Infinite Stars or Twisted Appendage in Single Target situations and Twilight Devastation in AoE situations. With the right gear, you can stack stat amplifying corruptions for really good results (usually with a couple of Ineffable Truth corruptions too).

Firstly, I'd like to speak about Severe, specifically in conjunction with the Expurgation Azerite Trait. This is a purely single target build, and the idea is to stack a lot of Crit, amplify it with Severe corruptions, and run 2x Expurgation traits. You will generally want to run 1x Light's Decree and 3x Avenger's Might alongside the 2x Expurgation traits. This is great for fights such as Wrathion, Xanesh, or Shad'har and Tyrannical Mythic + weeks.

Finally, I'd like to talk about the Masterful build which has gained a huge amount of popularity recently (again, nothing has "changed", we're just more easily able to target the corruptions now - Masterful build has always been very good for Ret). The idea is to stack Masterful corruptions alongside Mastery gear and/or Honed mind corruptions (if you don't have enough Mastery). The Masterful build is a very consistent build in Single Target situations but really excels in Cleave and AoE. You will need to sim yourself to see what works for you but as a general rule of thumb you will want to run 3x Avenger's Might traits and 3x Light's Decree traits in a Single Target situation, and in an AoE/Cleave situation you will want to drop 1 of the Avenger's Might traits and slap an Empyrean Power trait in there instead (Light's Decree does a lot of heavy lifting in AoE/Cleave situations); a combination of these traits and then as much Mastery statted gear at as high an ilvl as you can get it will generally net you quite good results - if your sims are showing low, you may not have enough Mastery, this is where you would run a Honed Mind corruption or two, it has very low variance, proccing very often and will give you a lot of Mastery for a relatively good corruption cost. Sims will generally tell you to run some Ineffable Truth with this build too if you have some in your bags (as stated previously, multiple rank 1s are the best bang for your buck in terms of corruption cost). The reason this build is very popular and a lot of Retribution Paladins are trying to build in to it right now is because it is very solid in a Single Target situation (it will not beat someone who has lucky procs of Infinite Stars during a fight in a purely Single Target situation, but it has a lot of burst, does high numbers, and is very consistent), however it excels in AoE situations due to all of the contributing factors that I've discussed. It's a very well rounded and consistent spec.

Just my 2 cents but this is why you will see a lot of Rets either building towards Single Target RNG based corruptions like Infinite Stars or Twisted Appendage, RNG AoE based corruptions such as Twilight Devastation, or synergising various corruptions such as Masterful/Honed Mind/Ineffable Truth for the Masterful build, or stacking Severe for the Expurgation/Crit ST build.

I wanted to talk about the direction that a lot of Retribution Paladin's are going in to give people an idea of something that they may want to build towards. There is no such thing as a BiS list, there is no perfect set of gear or corruptions to aim for because it comes down to personal preference, what is available to you, and what is realistically within reach (are you going to be able to get perfectly statted 475 items from your weekly chest? Unlikely) - so my advice is to look at all of the ways that Retribution Paladin can currently be played in terms of Talents/Azerite Traits/Essences/Corruptions and choose the one that suits you best, heck, make your own build - if you enjoy it and you don't hold your Raid/Dungeon team back in terms of output, who cares? :)

Here is a Masterful build Sim that I am using at the present moment (note that the corruption cap is 39 here: https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/xe7FP6wyJFfxhCtJjYgvC4

Here is an example of the Expurgation build that a fellow Retribution Paladin from the Hammer of Wrath Discord is currently using (note that the corruption cap is 59 here): https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/7AGR7KjShXgiiWfryCumEd

Comment by elthoras

who is writing this Guide? A wowdev with Greylogs ?

Pls delete this Guide, because its wrong in all Points.

Comment by Liaara

OK, so this guide is basicaly useless and simply not right i have absolutely different recomendation for Rets..

Single target: Best corruptions stacked Severe 3 due to super high crit scaling via double Expurgation traits, Ineffable truth 1, Masterful also one expedient can be good for more gcds in Crusade, however it does metter on your base stats : lot cus one is still just 12%.
AOE: ineffable truth 1 and masterfull is still the best Severe is dropping pretty severely becouse of we are using different traits for AOE, however Severe and Expedient can still shine when its combined with twilight devastation and gushing wounds, both of them scales with twilight devastation an GW, however i personaly dont like twilights on ret paladin the dmg is not very good compare to another classes as havoc, fury warrior, rng is pretty wild and one huge procs in Crusade can instantly kill you becouse of agro....

Comment by Dzumi

I would like to mention "the meme build" you can do with full stack of Ineffable Truth. Using 5 rank 1s and 2 rank 2s (for a safe 120 corruption before reduction, making it less than 40 total) could, with some luck, give you back to back wings usage. It is pretty RNG but can be a lot of fun. Works good in M+ since you could get wings for each pack. A bit less reliant in some raid encounters because of the mechanic timings (Vexiona for example).
Also with this many stacks of Ineffable, your other Cooldowns just become super short (hammer of wrath, judgement, blade of justice are 2-3s), basically not being able to keep up with them. Spells like Wake of Ashes and Divine Steed just reset in the 10s of the Ineffable Truth buff. Faster bubble and Shield of Vengeance is nice if combined with the cd reduction talent for those.
I would not recommend sinking all your echoes into this, but if you have nothing else to do it could be fun.

Retribution Paladin Corruption Guide - Shadowlands 9.0.1 Shadowlands 9.0.2

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